Israel has started work on rerouting a part of its West Bank wall more than two years after a Supreme Court order, the Israeli defense ministry said on Thursday.

For years the Bil'in inhabitants and their foreign supporters hold weekly traditional protest on Fridays by marching to the site of the Israeli separation wall. In December 2007, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the path of the wall in the village should be amended, which meant that Bil'in would restore more than 1,100 dunums of its land that was confiscated by the Israeli army for the sake of building a sector of the separation wall.

"We offered a new route, which the Supreme Court approved, and the work is under way," Israeli defense ministry spokesman Shlomo Dror told AFP on Thursday. According to him, the construction will last several months, and possibly until the end of the year.